


The Price of Intimacy

by Salamandriod



Series: Daemon AU [1]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemon Touching, Injury, M/M, Morning Cuddles, Touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 08:48:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5122154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Salamandriod/pseuds/Salamandriod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim, Sebastian, their daemons, and a very angry client. Surely nothing could go wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Price of Intimacy

“I have to say, I never figured you’d have a fox,” Sebastian said one day over breakfast.

 

Jim didn’t look up from the newspaper, though the hand in his daemon’s fur did come to a stop. The fox daemon in question cracked one of her eyes open, having not wanted the scratches to stop just yet.

 

The moment passed and Jim’s hand began moving again, allowing Aurea to relax against his side again. “And I didn’t think that someone that followed a tiger down a drain would have a little bird sitting on his shoulder,” he shot back casually.

 

“I’m hardly _little_ ,” Caelina insisted, fluttering down from atop a cabinet to the table beside Sebastian’s plate. He cut off a bit of his sausage and offered it to her, smirking a little as she gobbled it up.

 

“Golden Eagles are pretty damn large, you know. She’s hardly a songbird,” Sebastian replied. “Besides, I just meant that it was a bit unexpected, when we first met. Thought you might have a snake or a tarantula or something, not something so _cute_.”

 

That managed to pull a reaction from Jim, making him look up at Sebastian to glare at him. He took a deep breath, as though about to chew the other out, but the only thing he did was shut his mouth again. Even the feared Moriarty couldn’t argue that a fox wasn’t cute. “Well,” he said after a moment, setting his paper down. “I think it’s rather fitting. Foxes are cunning and underestimated. No one would expect a little fox to be quite so dangerous. Though, it would be amusing to make clients squirm by having a spider skitter across my desk.”

 

Aurea raised her head to look at Jim and whined. “Oh, hush, you know I’d never ask for you to be anything else,” Jim cooed, scratching her behind her ears to placate her.

 

Sebastian chuckled, always amused at how demanding Aurea was for attention. He always had the desire to reach out and give her a few scratches himself, but never seemed ready to make that step. He popped the last bite of his eggs into his mouth and put his fork down, then gently rubbed the feathers at the back of Caelina’s head, earning a small chirp of satisfaction in return. He stood up and offered his arm out to her, letting her easily hop up onto his shoulder, then took his dishes over to the sink to clean them.

 

“What about you? Certainly you must have expecting something other than an eagle,” Jim asked as he leafed through the last of the news.

  
  
“Not that we aren’t pleased you’re around, Caelina,” Aurea piped up quickly before the eagle could swoop over and hit them with her wings. Caelina glanced over towards them and fluttered her wings threateningly for a moment, careful not to whack Sebastian too much.

 

Sebastian seemed indifferent to their daemons’ bickering, simply ignoring the fluttering of wings to shrug his shoulders. “As long as Caelina didn’t end up anything like my father’s daemon, I’d have been happy. Just a bonus that she can help me on hits, so I think it’s worked out well,” he hummed casually. Caelina, on the other hand, seemed a bit awkward at the reference to their parents, preening part of her wing in order to pass it off as nothing.

 

“What was your father’s daemon like?” Jim asked, appearing at Sebastian’s elbow to rinse out his mug.

 

Immediately both Sebastian and Caelina stiffened, ignoring the question until all the dishes were away. “I’d rather not talk about either of them, really. Besides, we should get going to the meeting before traffic picks up,” he replied, voice devoid of emotion.

 

Jim narrowed his eyes at Sebastian, his mind already spinning in order to figure out how to get the man to tell him about his past. He was broken out of his thoughts by a gentle press of fur against his calf. He glanced down to see Aurea glaring up at him.

 

“Don’t,” she growled.

 

Jim stared at her for a moment longer, then rolled his eyes and walked away from the kitchen. Aurea watched him leave for a moment, then looked up at Sebastian. “He didn’t mean anything by it,” she assured, then followed after her partner.

 

Sebastian nodded but otherwise left it at that. He knew Jim always wanted to know every little detail, it was part of the reason that he was so good at his job. He sighed and finished putting the dishes away, then turned and went to get prepared for the day himself.

 

 

Sebastian wasn’t quite sure if it was just the lingering feeling from Jim’s question that morning, or if there was something about the meeting that was putting him off. He glanced around the room only to find that the client and his daemon, as well as Jim seemed to be behaving normally. Aurea seemed to be a bit nervous, not that anyone but he and Jim could tell. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Caelina, fluttering back and forth between two chairs nervously.

 

He tried to tell himself that it was just him, that Aurea was nervous just because the client they were working with was an idiot, and that Caelina was just echoing his own feelings. Perhaps, he thought idly, he’d finally get around to telling Jim about his father, even if it meant letting Caelina down. For a moment, that seemed to quell the knot of tension in his gut.

 

It was just his luck, however, that he was horribly, horribly wrong.

 

Sebastian saw the signs first, though it was Caelina that acted faster. She clawed at the client’s arm as he pulled his gun out, forcing him to shoot the first bullet off wildly, far off from its target.

 

Sebastian already had his own gun out, though his priority was getting Jim out of danger. He grabbed his boss’s arm, pulling him out of his seat and shoving him behind the table so that he was out of the line of sight of the windows covering the wall. With Jim relatively safe, he all but leapt at the client and grabbing for the gun. Two more shots went off while they were struggling, fortunately missing everyone. Sebastian could hear the client’s daemon, some kind of dog, fighting with both Aurea and Caelina, though he couldn’t tell who had the upper hand.

 

Just as he knocked the client down while ripping the gun from his grip, another shot rang out. Before Sebastian could register where it had come from, one of the windows shattered and sent a spray of glass shards into the room. Almost as instantly, a scream resonated throughout the room. Two screams, in fact.

 

Two screams that Sebastian wished he didn’t recognize. Jim and Aurea should never be screaming when he and Caelina were meant to protect them.

 

Without thinking, he pointed the client’s own gun back on him and shot him in the chest twice, putting him out of his misery quickly. He shoved both guns back into his belt, turning his attention out the window. It was hard to see, but he could recognize movement on the roof of a building opposite to them.

 

Sebastian turned just in time to catch Caelina’s eye as she zoomed out the now broken window towards the opposite roof. He knew the assassin would get away from her, but at least they wouldn’t be shooting at them any longer.

 

That left him with Jim and Aurea to deal with, and more importantly, the blood on the ground. Fortunately it wasn’t much of a question as to who had been hit by the shards since Jim was clutching a bleeding fox to his chest without a care for his suit. He looked almost deathly pale, despite not having been the one with shards of glass in his body. Sebastian immediately crossed over and knelt beside them, ignoring the bite of the glass against his knees.

 

Gently but firmly he pulled Aurea out of Jim’s grip and set her down so he could work. He vaguely registered Jim gasping beside him, but that wasn’t as important as making sure that Aurea was safe. He’d had to do similar things to himself plenty of times, so pulling some glass out of his boss’s – his partner’s – daemon was nothing to him.

 

Aurea cried out as Sebastian pulled the shards of glass out of her haunch, but she was smart enough not to thrash about and make things worse for everyone involved. Jim stroked behind her ears to calm the both of them, though it was hard to focus with someone else touching his daemon.

 

The moment that the last shard was out, Sebastian tore off a few strips of fabric from the hem of his shirt and wrapped them as tightly as he could around Aurea’s haunch. He wasn’t an expert in tying bandages around anything but humans, but something was better than nothing. With the bleeding stopped, he was sure that she'd make a full recovery with a bit of rest.

 

Caelina returned to them just as Sebastian finished, landing elegantly beside Aurea and letting the blood on her talons mix with the blood on the ground. She didn’t so much as spare a glance at Sebastian before hopping closer to Aurea and pressing her beak gently into her fur, doing what she could to calm the fox.

 

Jim gently scooped Aurea back up into his arms, his hands were still shaking from what had just happened. He was still pale, though not quite as bad as he'd been just minutes ago. He cooed something softly into her ear as he stood, then glanced at Sebastian, as though unsure what to say for once.

 

Sebastian rose to his feet himself, only just realizing that he’d finally touched Jim’s daemon for the first time. Feeling a bit awkward, he dusted off his trousers then scratched the back of his head, trying to figure out how to explain himself. “I wasn’t- You know I never- It won’t happen again,” he stuttered.

 

Jim regarded him for a moment, only to look away again when Aurea squirmed in his grasp. “I know. Don’t- Don’t worry about it,” he assured softly. Without another word, he turned and left.

 

Caelina flew up and took up her usual place on Sebastian’s shoulder. “That could have been worse,” she commented quietly.

 

Sebastian chuckled slightly, finally letting some of the tension out of his shoulders. “Yeah, I suppose so,” he mumbled.

 

 

Sebastian wrapped his arms around Jim and pulled him closer, trying to escape the sunlight by burying his face into Jim’s hair. The motion earned a grumble from Jim, though he didn’t try to escape from the other’s grip. After a few moments Sebastian relented and pulled his face away from Jim, turning his head to look at Aurea.

 

“Feel better?” he asked, his voice still rough from sleep.

 

The fox lazily blinked at Sebastian, then slowly stood up and limped across the bed to curl underneath his hand and against Jim’s chest. “I think getting some more scratches would help me heal faster,” she replied smugly, practically grinning at him.

 

Sebastian raised an eyebrow and chuckled but nevertheless he started scratching behind her ears. “I don’t see how that’ll help, but who am I to deny my favorite fox?” he teased.

 

Between them, a soft moan escaped Jim, earning a chuckle from both Sebastian and Aurea, which in turn finally woke Caelina up.

 

Caelina fluttered down from her perch, landing just below Jim’s chin. She ruffled her feathers a little, then tucked herself right up against the Irishman to make sure they were both comfortable.

 

“The lot of you are bastards,” Jim muttered, burying his nose into Caelina’s feathers.

 

Feeling Jim snuggle into his daemon brought a content sigh to Sebastian’s lips and he let himself bury his face into his hair again. “Love you too, Jim.”

**Author's Note:**

> Caelina - feminine variant of ancient Roman Caelius, meaning heaven. Sir Augustus Moran's daemon would want Sebastian's daemon to have a name fit for a noble, so something Roman in origin seemed to fit. Eagles are typically associated with leadership and strength, both good qualities for Jim's second in command. I specifically picked a golden eagle for Seb because I think they're the most majestic. Fight me. 
> 
> Aurea - From the latin world 'aureus,' meaning golden. I imagine Jim's parents' daemons would be a bit better at naming kids than the parents themselves. As mentioned, foxes are typically associated with trickery and cunning, which makes it perfect for Jim. Not to mention that like foxes, Jim can be adorable. 
> 
> It's been a long time since I last read His Dark Materials, so forgive me if I screwed up any details. I don't remember if daemons bleed, but I'm making it happen. I really liked this idea when I stared but I felt like I lost it a little in the middle, so tell me what you think. I really need to work on writing action scenes more.


End file.
